separate two eggs: weight loss and mise en place

Detail, Market Scene with Christ and the Adulteress, Pieter Aertsen, 1559, Staedel Museum, Frankfurt.

I’m prepping to receive about 100 lbs. of the tastiest, juiciest, pasture-fed, local beef, so I’m desperately trying to eat down my standing freezer.  This is a bit harder as one person than two, especially one who has been battling appetite slumps and anxiety cooking jags and antisocial moods and dining out hopes and growing terror about a headlong dive into poverty.

I’m finding little gems squirreled away in corners, now that I’ve freed the chicken carcasses, the oxtail bones, and the half pig head, trotter, and jowl from their frozen prisons to make stock.  I bring you the cornucopia of my life, most of it put up in the last year:

• two fine pieces of lasagna;
• 4 cups of sour cherries;
• a quart bag of home-cured posole;
• 4 cups of ajvar;
• 3 gallon bags stuffed full of, respectively, boysenberries, haskapberries, and cranberries;
• 1 gallon or so of tomato paste, portioned into 2 tablespoon-sized cubes;
• 2 cups shredded zucchini;
• 4 cups of sauerkraut golabki, pink; consumed;
• bag o’ pancakes (pancakes?);
• 2 cups b’steeya filling;
• bolete pierogi (yum);
• 2 half-pints duck rillettes;
• 8 or 10 pieces of injera;
• local polenta;
• 2 quarts corn;
• 1 cup wild mushroom duxelles;
• 1 quart raisins (to go with the two more gallons raisins on my shelf and other freezer);
• 2 gallons grapes to make more damn raisins;
• 8 cups roasted sweetmeat squash;
• a big package of forgotten homemade sausages (yay!);
• pancetta;
• 1 pint pork/raisin/almond tamale filling;
• pork skin;
• a bag of chicken feet;
• and the meats and stocks one might expect.

I’m not even down into the bowels of the freezer yet. Or addressing the daily-use freezer full of readymades in the house.  If I were a civilization, what would this archaeological dig say about me, other than I’ve an embarrassment of riches?

Wait, don’t answer that.

Separate Two Eggs is my new, very occasional, series about a lonely single woman eating sad meals alone. Or not. It’s really just a way to continue to queer food writing and add diversity to the Mommy-blogging and monogamous couple-oriented fare (not that there’s anything wrong with that).